The evolving state of credentialing will make room for the emergence of new players, who can hold badges or service blockchains between students, campuses and employers. In fact, Blockchain-based technologies are already being leveraged. Institutions such as The University of Texas are developing blockchain-based transcript services that can ease the process with which credentials are […]

Most students attend college to earn a degree—a respected credential that informs the world and the workplace that they have specific knowledge and skills, and the maturity and intellect to prove it. “Issuing and maintaining credentials is central to American higher education. Nobody can really compete with us on this. That’s our crown jewel, in […]

The Lumina Foundation has been pursuing the goal of recognizing and accepting for-credit microcredentials and learning experiences for several years, through their Connecting Credentials effort and the proposed framework they launched back in 2015 (http://connectingcredentials.org/). This framework seeks to define an architecture wherein competencies can be defined in structured sets that can lead to microcredentials that […]

Aaron Sams, Jon Bergmann and a handful of other educators first began sharing their experiences creating educational videos about a decade ago. Some other teachers had started using similar techniques years earlier, so there is some debate over the true birth of “flipped classroom.” While the timeline can be debated, it is a certainty that […]

The internet of things—known in acronym-speak as IoT—seems to be popping up everywhere. Everything is getting connected. Thermostats, fitness bands, voice-controlled assistants, remotely controlled webcams, smartphones, washing machines, autonomous vehicles—the list goes on and on. Gadgets of every shape, size and function connect to the internet to gather and share massive amounts of data. Growth […]

If you haven’t heard of blockchain yet, then it’s time to add this term to your technology lexicon. The most widely known use of the technology to date has been bitcoin, but blockchain is ripe with possibilities that go far beyond digital currency, with the potential to impact many industries, including higher education. What is […]

The smartphone has become ubiquitous on college campuses. In the U.S., some estimates indicate that 95 percent of 18- to 24-years-olds have a smartphone, and that number will continue to grow. Students and instructors use their smartphones every day to communicate with friends, family and colleagues, manage their schedules, consume content, and much more. Their […]

The growing availability of custom and commercial software applications allows colleges and universities to transform classroom laboratory experiences into virtual equivalents that offer advantages over their physical precursors. This change is gradually evolving at higher ed institutions across the nation and the globe. For example, New Mexico State University has made virtual science labs available […]